Hinch: Religion, minus the God stuff

Aug. 22, 2013

Updated 9:39 p.m.

1 of 5

Congregants and visitors form a circle while engaging in the shalom chaverim during the 8th annual University Synagogue BBQ in Irvine. The congregation organizes non-traditional events like this regularly. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Congregants and visitors form a circle while engaging in the shalom chaverim during the 8th annual University Synagogue BBQ in Irvine. The congregation organizes non-traditional events like this regularly. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

For much of her life, Sari Schreiber felt alienated from part of her Jewish faith. Though Judaism is central to her identity, there was a particular teaching of the faith that she just couldn’t accept:

God.

“I don’t really remember what made me think there’s no man up in the clouds,” said Schreiber, 52, recalling her time as a child in Hebrew school. “I don’t think my parents really believed that, either… In religious school I felt pressure to believe, a lot of shoulds and shouldn’ts. But that’s not my nature. I rebelled.”

For years, Schreiber, a social worker who lives in Laguna Niguel, remained a faithful Jew, attending synagogue and celebrating high holidays. But she didn’t believe in God. And so, during rituals, she often found herself saying one thing and thinking another.

Then, 17 years ago, Schreiber and her husband and their two children walked into University Synagogue in Irvine. University is a Reconstructionist synagogue, part of a growing movement in Judaism that preserves Jewish ritual and tradition but does not require belief in a supernatural God.

“I had an ‘ah-ha’ moment,” Schreiber said. “The philosophy of godliness (at University Synagogue) is that God is in the good deeds we do, and in the positive energy in the world. When I came here and heard that as the definition of God, I said, ‘Oh, I can deal with that.’”

Schreiber’s spiritual path—seeking religion without a supernatural God—might sound paradoxical. But it is not unusual.

In fact, Schreiber is part of the fastest growing spiritual movement in America, people whose spiritual beliefs fall into no established traditional category.

Last year, the Pew Research Center made headlines with a survey of Americans’ religious attitudes that showed a surge in people abandoning traditional religious affiliation. For the first time, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans surpassed the number of white evangelical Protestants.

Media accounts interpreted the findings as a sign of rising secularism in America. But buried in the Pew study were some surprising facts.

One in five Americans identified as religiously unaffiliated. But two-thirds of those people said they believe in God or a universal spirit. More than a quarter attend worship services at least once a year. Nearly half pray, sometimes daily. Even a quarter of people who identify as atheists said they believe in God (raising a question about how well people understand the word “atheism,” among other things.)

It’s not that Americans are abandoning religious faith altogether, said Elizabeth Drescher, a lecturer in religious studies at Santa Clara University who is writing a book about so-called “nones”— people who check “none of the above” when asked to state their religious identity.

“The majority of nones accept the idea of some kind of higher power or force or being,” Drescher said. “But they don’t want to be told what to believe or think… It’s very libertarian.”

Instead, said Drescher, a growing number of Americans see their religious identity not as something fixed—as in, “I’m a Christian,” or, “I’m a Jew”— but as a path of discovery that’s different for everyone and changes over time.

“We’re Googling and crowd-sourcing meaning-making,” Drescher said.

Which explains why, 26 years after it was founded by a handful of families dissatisfied with their experience at other Orange County synagogues, University Synagogue is now one of the largest Jewish congregations in the county, with more than 600 families, a preschool and a speaker series featuring best-selling authors and members of the Israeli Knesset.

“They’re relieved, excited, the light bulb goes off in their head when they encounter University Synagogue,” said Rabbi Arnold Rachlis of his congregation. “They don’t say, ‘Oh, you changed my mind.’ It’s more like, ‘You articulated what I always believed.’”

Outwardly, University Synagogue appears like any other place of Jewish worship. There are Friday prayer services, high holiday celebrations, a weekend Hebrew school and bar and bat mitzvahs.

But when worshippers say traditional Jewish prayers, most of them interpret the words very differently.

“We leave the prayer as it is but we acknowledge it was written 2,000 years ago when people were in an agricultural society,” said Carol Richmond of Irvine, one of the synagogue’s founders.

“We say some of this is historical and some of this is based on oral myths…(There’s) that freedom to look at it from different angles and not find it stuffed down your throat.”

Richmond teaches an annual introduction to Judaism class for new members. She said many of her students grew up in Christian churches and now seek a place of worship that gives them freedom to explore their own ideas about the divine.

“We have no God police here,” Richmond said. “Everyone is searching in one way or another, and isn’t that healthy and good?”

The synagogue’s menu of adult education includes classes on yoga and meditation. A quarter of members are married to non-Jewish partners. No one is pressured to convert.

“I think of all religions as parallel paths to the same divine reality,” said Rabbi Rachlis. “(Religions) are human phenomena. People created them and shaped them. There’s no ultimate truth in any religion. People are just trying to figure it out.”

Drescher, at Santa Clara University, said the findings in last year’s Pew survey sounded alarms in many traditional religious denominations. But the numbers, she said, weren’t surprising to historians of American religion.

Though America is often considered unusually religious compared to other industrialized nations, that high degree of religiosity is in fact a historical anomaly.

Until World War II, church attendance in America held steady at about 20 percent of the population, Drescher said. That was true even before the American Revolution, a period often depicted, wrongly, as a time of near-universal religious devotion.

Church attendance shot up after World War II, Drescher said, because Christianity was promoted as a bulwark against communism, and because churches were seen as a haven of stability in a nation traumatized by war.

For the past several decades, religious affiliation in America has gradually returned to the historical norm, with Protestant churches, both liberal and conservative, losing the most members.

The only forms of religious expression currently expanding in America are predominantly immigrant religions, such as Islam, and what Drescher called the “nones.”

Even the word religion no longer adequately describes what a growing number of Americans are seeking, Drescher said.

“I talked to people (while researching her book) for whom surfing is a spiritual practice, or hiking,” Drescher said. “(There’s) this need for people who are unbelievers to have community, to do good works in the world, to feel like life has meaning and purpose.”

Sari Schreiber, who is currently president of University Synagogue’s board of directors, said she could have joined any number of community organizations. But she said a purely secular organization would not have satisfied her desire to remain connected with the richness of Jewish tradition, ritual and community.

Some people at University Synagogue “have a commitment to the (Jewish) culture, some people to the (Jewish) religion,” Schreiber said. “For me, I don’t need to define it as a religion. It is a religion—but there’s so much flexibility… We don’t have to be so rigid.”

User Agreement

Keep it civil and stay on topic. No profanity, vulgarity, racial
slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about
tragedies will be blocked. By posting your comment, you agree to
allow Orange County Register Communications, Inc. the right to
republish your name and comment in additional Register publications
without any notification or payment.